


if today was not a crooked highway

by spark_s



Category: SKAM (Spain)
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:42:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25084090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spark_s/pseuds/spark_s
Summary: A brief look at Joana's perspective in season 2.-"One day, she’s lying on her bathroom floor with her hands over her eyes trying not to break at the seams; the next, she has an angel in her arms. An angel is playing with her fingers, an angel is braiding her hair, an angel is stroking her cheek with an angelic thumb and convincing her that she deserves everything.She almost believes it, too.Her doubts, though, they feel so small, so insignificant in this moment. What space does self-loathing have in this room so filled with love?"
Relationships: Joana Bianchi Acosta/Cristina "Cris" Soto Peña
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	if today was not a crooked highway

**Author's Note:**

> warning: this contains graphic descriptions of struggles with BPD. there are mentions of extreme hopelessness, feelings of emptiness, and implicit suicide idealization. 
> 
> title from tomorrow is a long time by bob dylan. i listened to it a lot while writing this.

Sometimes, Joana yearns so much it hurts.

On the bus. Walking to class. Sitting next to Cris.

It burns like someone blasted a hole in the middle of her chest and it only grows, the ash clogging her throat until she wants so much, she’s choking on it.

The want is the worst at night, when she’s lying in bed alone and the whir of her laptop fan hums in harmony with her _slow tunes for late nights_ playlist. On these nights, she holds a pillow to her chest and tries to breathe through it, tries to grasp the longing with her hands and mold it into something other than a spear.

It doesn’t work. 

Instead, it gnaws at her insides until she’s curled on her side, knees to her chest and lungs shuddering. She wishes she could cry it out into her sheets. It’s too much, she thinks, sometimes, to be a real person. The weight of living bears heavily, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

\--

Other times, though, she wonders if, where her heart is supposed to be, a void exists instead.

The frequent brushes against her arm, blue eyes smiling at her – they steal her breaths, but nothing flutters inside of her like her mom said it should. She wants them to, though. She wants to feel her insides expand until her heart is threatening to burst out of her chest, then give it to Cris and hope against reason that she’ll give her heart in return.

It never happens when she wants it to.

Instead, she sits next to her in Literature and wishes she had the will to do something, _anything_. To hold her hand, to grab her face, to press her lips on hers and weave her tongue into her mouth and never have a single doubt about love ever again.

She wishes she didn’t feel so empty inside. How could she ever expect Cris to feel something for someone with nothing there? How could she ever expect someone so full of life to love a hollow person?

\--

But one day, it changes.

One day, she’s lying on her bathroom floor with her hands over her eyes trying not to break at the seams; the next, she has an angel in her arms. An angel is playing with her fingers, an angel is braiding her hair, an angel is stroking her cheek with an angelic thumb and convincing her that she deserves everything.

She almost believes it, too.

Her doubts, though, they feel so small, so insignificant in this moment. What space does self-loathing have in this room so filled with love?

She pushes them to the side, banishes them from her head and her heart and diverts all her attention to hearing that sound Cris made when she did bent her fingers _just right_ again. She wants to hear it again, and again, and again. She wants to hear it quiet, barely a breath in her ear. She wants to hear it muffled in her own mouth. She wants to hear it yelled at the ceiling with thighs around her ears.

She does.

\--

The fires come back, though. They always do.

They yell at her that she’s not enough. She’s not worth the oxygen she breathes, that her place on this earth is undeserved. The fires tell her that she will always be like this: a waste of space, a waste of time, just an obstacle in everyone’s lives. They tell her that these people she loves – her parents, Cris – would be better of without her. That she should just leave.

She doesn’t want to believe it, no. 

They burn away her denials until there’s nothing left to do but scream loud enough to drown them.

\--

The doctors give her something that extinguishes the flames, but the ashes remain.

They weigh a thousand kilos each and settle in her veins like they belong there. They whisper now, and when it’s quiet enough, silent enough, she hears them.

The worst is in the mornings. The silence left behind Cris hangs on her like a storm. It’s only in the mornings that she doesn’t have Cris’ laugh, Cris’ voice. Cris' heart not softly pounding against hers.

They convince her that this can only end badly – that, no matter how long it takes, she will be the one to explode and burn everything in her path. That Cris will walk away with burns and scars and singed hair, and that she will never be the same. That she will never smile the same for fear of lighting a deadly match, like she did Joana’s.

She breaks up with Cris in the morning.

She watches as an angel’s heart breaks in front of her and tells herself its for the best. That Cris is better off. That Joana is not made for relationships, because all she can do is break.

She feels herself shatter. She feels like she’s made a mistake. She wishes she couldn’t feel anything.

She reaches up and closes the curtains – she does not deserve the sun.

\--

She convinces herself that the pain will fade, leaving scars on her heart and her hands and her lips and her eyes and anything else touched by the light.

She has resigned herself to existing as half a person, with a ball of guilt anchored to her chest and no spine to hold it. When she reaches inside of herself to find something – some courage, perhaps – she only finds a void. Her hands grasp at nothing at all, and she feels herself falling into it again.

But then.

Then: her longing pulls her to Cris, to those big blue eyes of hope and happiness and faith and everything Joana could – _should –_ never have. Her footsteps echo in her ears. 

Then: Cris hands her the package and the book she holds weighs differently than shame, but she doesn’t know what it is.

Then: Cris has the audacity to _argue_ with her. She has the audacity to dispute what’s good for her, that Joana is not it, that the world has so much more to offer her and that loving Joana is like loving a hurricane. 

Then: Cris smiles at her, and it’s like she’s been given the sun. Cris smiles at her and tells her that she doesn’t care about the future, that a single minute is more than enough, that _Joana_ is more than enough. 

The rebuttals die in her throat. 

_Minute by minute._

Maybe, if Joana can fight away the doubt and the anger and the violence and the loneliness for sixty seconds, she can have Cris. She can have her smile, her laugh, her eyes and hair and hands and heart and every damn molecule that she fell in love with all those weeks ago.

She just has to focus on them for a full minute.

Yeah, okay, she can do that.

\--

And then there’s this.

There are nights that aren’t so bad anymore. Where, instead of clutching her knees, she runs her fingers down a china ribcage and feels the pulse underneath it, traces the slopes and divots with her inhales and kisses into the exhales. 

There are peaceful mornings, where the sun doesn’t burn or give volume to violent whispers. The sun snores into the space beneath her neck and breathes new love into her chest, fills it with something that she can hold to her heart.

There are still afternoons of pain, where each day crushes her underneath their weight and makes her scream for mercy. Where she can only lie on the bathroom floor with the door closed because her bedsheets are too much. Where she yells (they both yell), where she cries (they both cry), where she digs her fingernails into her palms for that minute, and maybe the next three (or four).

But the fires don’t rage so hot anymore. They don’t scorch the earth beneath her feet, they don’t occupy every space, and they don’t burn anyone else.

Because there is this: a hand in hers, stroking her thumb, up and down.

There is this: two foreheads pressed together, a single breath shared between two mouths.

This: a blurred line for when Joana ends and Cris begins.

There are minutes,

and love,

and

_this._


End file.
